syntactic processing

There are differences between males and females during language processing, but how the brain functions to support this difference is still controversial. It has been hypothesized that language functions are more strongly left-lateralized in males, whereas they are represented more bilaterally in females. However, insufficient evidence exists to prove it. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of gender on syntactic processing using the analysis of electroencephalography signals. This approach provides the opportunity to identify the difference between males and females in event-related potential (ERP) components associated with syntactic processing. Hence, 22 highly proficient monolingual Persian speakers (11 females) participated in this experiment. Using auditory syntactic violation paradigm, event-related potentials were extracted from the final syllable of Persian sentences in MATLAB software. Then, the mean amplitudes were analyzed using a repeated measures ANOVA in SPSS-26 software. The current electroencephalographic findings revealed that although females exhibited a larger signal amplitude and in ungrammatical stimuli as compared to grammatical stimuli in the 500-700-ms interval, but the difference was not statistically significant (P > 0.05). In addition, the amplitude of P600 was widely detected to be left hemisphere dominant, however, no gender-related differences were found. In general, based on these findings, it can be concluded that syntactic processing in highly proficient males and females is independent of the gender variable.

This article aims to investigate the correlation between the memory skill with syntactic and phonological awareness in the process of reading comprehension both in normal and dyslexic Persian speaking children. Working memory is an important factor for reading process having an important role in phonological and syntactic processing during reading comprehension process. There are different approaches and models of memory. But the common fact of all of them is that memory is a multicomponent system and the roles of which is the storage and the processing of different kinds of information.  This investigation is done based on Baddely (1999) and Jackendoff (2002) models of memory. Jackendoff (2002) believes that memory can be considered as a table on which different processors including phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic processors are processing linguistic structures.

This study attempted to answer the following questions: "Which constructions in Persian correspond to the conventional definition of sentences with the garden path effect? Moreover, based on the ideas of sentence processing, how these constructions can be classified in Persian?” Firstly, this paper described garden path sentences in English and introduced theoretical concepts and patterns related to sentence processing. After the examination of ambiguity and more particularly structural ambiguity, it was concluded that the Persian language has structures that match the English definition of the garden path sentences. Furthermore, structural ambiguity can also be considered as a type of sentence with the garden path effect. On the whole, Persian garden path sentences can be divided into two types: those with one correct grammatical reading and those with more than one reading due to syntactic or semantic reasons. Using the ideas from the field of sentence processing, it appears that the effective factors causing the garden path effect in Persian sentences are similar to those that yield this effect in English sentences. Finally, we argued for the importance of speech prosody and punctuation to eliminate ambiguities from written sentences.Keywords: syntactic processing, Garden path sentences, ambiguity, punctuation, prosody

Language is a cognitive ability that has a creative and generative system called syntax. Syntax is of special importance in language due to the infinite production of sentences, and it is thought that human beings produce and understand sentences automatically and without awarness. Due to the importance of this issue, the present study investigates the degree of autamaticity of syntactic processing in Persian. For this purpose, event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded by electroencephalography, which has a time resolution of one millisecond. This research was performed by conducting an experiment at the National Brain Mapping Laboratory of Iran and with the financial support of the Cognitive Science and Technology Council on Persian speaking speakers. In this expriment, using the paradigm of attentional blink in a language processing task in the form of short and limited syntactic contexes, we examine the degree of automaticity of processing these contexes by ERP registration with 22 volunteers (10 women and 12 men, with an average age of 23.8 years). The obtained signals were analyzed using EEGlab software in MATLAB program. The test results showed that syntactic processing is not an automated process but a mentally controlled process and is performed in a completely conscious manner.

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of construction similarity and verb tense in the construction of integrated syntactic representations in Persian and English bilinguals. Bilingual speakers aged 18 to 40 years (mean= 23 years old) fluent in Persian (as a mother tongue) and English (as a second language) attended in this study. We used the cross-language syntactic priming paradigm. The participants were first presented a sentence (prime sentence) in language A, which had a special syntactic construction such as the passive structure. Then the participants had to produce a sentence in language B (target sentence) in order to describe the target picture. If her/his production of sentences in language B is significantly influenced by the syntactic structure of the sentence that was first presented to her/him (i.e., s/he uses the same syntactic construction of the previous sentence), it is feasible to believe that crosslanguage syntactic priming occurred. In the present study, 4 experiments were designed in which the language of the prime sentence was Persian or English and the target language was either Persian or English. Also, in order to examine whether the syntactic representation is independent from the tense of the verb and whether syntactic priming is affected by whether tense of the verb stayed the same or differed between prime and target, the tense of the prime and target sentences was either the same or different in Experiments 2 and 4. The results showed that there were no cross-language priming effects in any linguistic directions (Persian to English and English to Persian). These results showed that structural differences in Persian and English languages are an influential factor in the occurrence of cross-language syntactic priming and, different word order of passive sentences prevents the occurrence of crosslanguage syntactic priming. The results from Experiments 2 and 4 also revealed that if the tense of the prime sentence is different or the same from the tense of the target sentence, cross-language syntactic priming did not occur.

Previous research showed that deaf individuals in compare to hearing ones perform weaker in syntactic processing. Therefore, they are expected to compensate for this defect through using their background knowledge. The aims of this study were to investigate the effect of deafness on the participants’ ability to comprehend subject relative clauses, and to determine their strategies in comprehending the semantically plausible subject relative clauses and semantically implausible ones within the theoretical framework of Interactive-Compensatory Model (Stanovich, 1980). The performance of 4 profound deaf students in fifth grades as the experimental group and 4 healthy hearing students as the control group was studied in a cross-sectional research to evaluate their comprehension of semantically plausible subject relative clauses and semantically implausible ones. The findings of this research showed that there was no significant difference between the performance of the deaf and hearing participants in comprehending semantically plausible sentences (p>0/05). However, a significant difference between the performance of the two groups was observed with respect to their comprehension of semantically implausible sentences (p<0/05). Based on the analysis of the data, it was concluded that the difficulty that the deaf experimental group experienced in processing semantically implausible subject relative sentences can be attributed to their use of a top-down strategy in comprehending these syntactic structures.